Press Release: Two years ago, Amer­ican artist John Kleckner, born in
Iowa in 1978, took up paint­ing again. After working almost exclu­sively
with ink, water­color and pencil on paper for sev­eral years, he
cre­ated a dozen large-format paint­ings, which will be on view for the
first time in our exhi­bi­tion. This change of technique has also
prompted a change of style: the organic shapes and nat­u­ral­is­tic
sub­jects of his works on paper have given way to geo­met­ric
struc­tures, inject­ing an entirely new ten­sion into his
com­po­si­tions. Now we find bars of carefully wrought plas­tic­ity,
intricately assem­bled arrows and, in matt sil­ver shimmer, ser­pen­tine
convo­lu­tions as well as many zones of color. But how do these
ele­ments relate within the pic­ture? Patches of quirkily mutat­ing
pig­ment and strangely falling shad­ows pose a rid­dle to the viewer:
are they two-dimen­sional shapes that overlap, or are they
three-dimen­sional arrange­ments of objects?

Kleckner’s works do not reveal the artist’s inten­tion
imme­di­ately. And how­ever hard we try, almost none of his
com­po­si­tions can be nailed down in fig­u­ra­tive terms. But our
attempts to grasp and anal­yse his paint­ings yield a differ­ent
insight: if at first the collaged com­po­si­tions and color
var­i­a­tions sug­gest random com­pi­la­tions of het­ero­ge­neous
compo­nents, closer scrutiny soon reveals that there is more to this
than stand-alone arrange­ments. Again and again, sim­i­lar forms and
hues emerge, some­times promi­nently placed, some­times cunn­ingly
con­cealed. They belong to a surpris­ingly con­sis­tent formal
repertoire that Kleckner has devel­oped over the last three years and
exploited in var­i­ous ways for his se­ries of paint­ings. With this
spectrum of ele­ments, Kleckner’s style is tread­ing new territory,
lend­ing an unsus­pected momen­tum to his work. Many motifs seem to hark
back to past visual worlds, notably from the 1960s to the 1990s—surely
no coinci­dence for an artist who has declared the Ger­man term
“Stilbruch” (breach of style) to be one of his favou­rite words.

Kleckner’s new repertoire of form is based on an
on-going se­ries of paper collages that he started making in 2012. They
con­tain frag­ments from sig­nif­icant ref­er­ences to art history,
photos, graphic designs, snip­pets of global pop cul­ture and much more
besides. Many of these collages have never been trans­lated into a
paint­ing, while oth­ers have been pro­cessed sev­eral times over with
var­i­a­tions. But Kleckner does not cling slav­ishly to his own
templates. Ulti­mately, the col­ors and shapes are always var­ied. Thus
every paint­ing is lib­er­ated from its pre­cursor, and by the end of
the pro­cess two solitaires have been cre­ated. Kleckner refers to them
as “carefully planned acci­dents”.

In the collages them­selves there are no text
ele­ments to be found—at least, almost none. For although Kleckner
him­self dis­penses with cut-out letters, each collage bears an
enigmatic title printed at the bot­tom of the page: a number fol­lowed
by a lengthy dash, fol­lowed in turn by two or three blanks, a ques­tion
mark and end­ing with a year. The pages with these enigmatic titles
were taken from the exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue for Joseph Beuys’ The Secret Block for a Secret Per­son in Ire­land. Beuys attributed these combina­tions to the 296 works in his Block
of 456 draw­ings, which had no spe­cific titles of their own. The
number in front is the runn­ing inventory number and changes
accord­ingly. Kleckner could not resist this blend of both the
“impen­e­tra­ble and mys­te­r­i­ous” and the “pseudo-sci­entific and
spe­cific”. It allowed him to appro­pri­ate and apply a sys­tem­atic
framework for his own Block, which he eventu­ally called Ques­tions for a Secret Per­son in Iowa.

Kleckner’s first encounter with the work of the
leg­endary Ger­man action artist and inventor of the Social Sculp­ture
was a deter­min­ing moment in his artis­tic devel­op­ment. As a stu­dent
he came across two small vol­umes about Beuys’ early draw­ings that
shook his views of art—and what it could and should do—to the core. In
the next few years, the idea that reproduc­tions, like those of Beuys’
works, might func­tion as a springboard for his own orig­inal work began
to take shape. Now Kleckner’s cre­ations have been reproduced in his
first mono­graphic exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue—and they in turn can serve
other artists as a basis for orig­inals of their own. It is poten­tially
a chain reac­tion, and Kleckner certainly sees the funny side of it.

Monday, June 26, 2017

Here are some pics from my 'final(?)' show at Coup d'Oeil Art Consortium in New Orleans.It was quite a surprise thatso many ghosts decided not to come home with me.

Press Release (abbreviated):

CHRIS DENNIS: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. A special exhibition presented by Coup d’Oeil Art Consortium, New Orleans June 9th and 10th 2017.
Coup d’Oeil Art Consortium is pleased to welcome the return of Chris
Dennis in June, for a special two day exhibition of paintings, spanning
his exhibition history with the gallery. Chris Dennis joined Coup
while it was still in its infancy, back in 2009. In that time, he has
participated in numerous group shows and salons at the gallery, featured at art fairs in Miami and New York, and presented three well received solo shows:

*Any similarity to persons living or dead is entirely intentional(2009), detritus(2011)andPlease Be Quiet, Please (2013).
New Orleans is a hard town to turn your back on, and when Chris left
Louisiana in 2010 he left behind many belongings and a lot of paintings,
leaving the door open for a possible return. But, after three years in
Auckland (NZ) and three in Zürich (CH), Chris has settled with his
family, in Berlin.

Chris has recently exhibited in group and solo shows across Europe and New Zealand including Auckland, Berlin, London, Brighton, Saint Gallen and Zürich. In 2016 he presented MOTIF/MOTIVE, (his most ambitious solo show to date), at the Jedlitschka Gallery in Zürich, Switzerland and in May 2017 he had a solo booth at the 25th anniversary of Huntenkunst in the Netherlands. Please join us on the evening of Friday June 9th, 2017 from 5pm – 8pm and on Saturday June 10th from 10am -2pm. Chris will be in the gallery from early Friday morning, hanging the show. If you are unable to make the opening, please stop by anytime during the day to view the work, say hello or goodbye, and perhaps save him the trouble of putting a piece on the wall.